Nanoscale fabrication technologies are crucial for construction of new nanoscale devices and systems as well as for manufacturing the next generation of higher-density semiconductor devices. Conventional e-beam lithography with single-line writing is inherently slow and costly. Projection e-beam lithography technology, sometimes called SCALPEL, is disclosed in Berger et al., U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,701,014 and 5,079,112 and in Gaston, U.S. Pat. No. 5,532,496. Projection e-beam lithography can expose about 1 cm2 in an exposure time of <1 second, but it is too slow for manufacturing. The technique also requires special stencil masks and has a relatively poor resolution of several tens of nanometers.
Two-dimensional, x-y addressable array of electron field emission sources include the cold tip cathode array by C. A. Spindt, C. E. Holland, A. Rosengreen, and I. Brodie in “Field emitter array development for high frequency operation,” J. Vac. Sci. Technol. B, vol. 11, pp. 468–473, 1993 and the nanotube field emission display cathodes described by W. B. Choi, et al., in “Carbon-Nanotube Based Field-Emission Displays for Large Area and Color Applications”, Journal of Information Display, Vol. 1, No. 1, p. 59, December 2000. In theory, such arrays may be used to achieve simultaneous e-beam writing. However, it would be impractical to make each cold cathode structure sufficiently small (on the order of ˜10 nanometers) to achieve the resolution of the current e-beam lithography. Even if such a nanoscale cathode structure could be fabricated, the number of cathode cells and associated lead wires required for x-y addressing would be astronomical. To carry out two-dimensional e-beam lithography on a 12 inch diameter wafer, it would take ˜1014 cathodes and wire connections. Accordingly there is need for a new lithography approach which can pattern a wider area with higher throughput and higher resolution.